The institutional open access policy facilitates the dissemination of OU-Norman’s research and scholarship products as widely as possible, extending the reach and impact of our scholarly work.  It assists faculty in complying with open access mandates from funders, including the US federal government.  The policy enables faculty authors to retain the rights to their work.  Readers who cannot afford the fees charged by for-profit publishers to access work behind a paywall can receive access to OU-Norman scholarship that is made open access under the policy.

The policy was developed by faculty appointed by the OU-Norman Faculty Senate in the 2022-23 academic year.  The policy is based on the Harvard model policy.  The policy was built on the work conducted by the Faculty Senate’s University Libraries Committee, 2019-2022; the committee consulted stakeholders from across campus as well as representatives of other institutions having institutional open access policies.  

Yes, over 100 academic institutions have open access policies, including two-thirds of AAUs.  Such policies have been in existence since the early 2000s.

• Gives you the ability to make your work openly accessible without the extra step of negotiating with publishers;
• Enables the university to help make your works openly accessible;
• Preserves your freedom to publish in the journals you choose;
• Preserves your freedom to decide which of your publications you wish to make openly accessible; 
• Enhances your rights to reuse your work for research and teaching; 
• Gives you more rights over your work than standard, or even progressive, publishing contracts;
• Increases readership and citation of research;
• Makes it easier for instructors to assign your work to their students; 
• Keeps publicly funded research in public hands; and
• Helps to control costs for libraries and readers.

• The policy applies to scholarly articles written by OU-Norman faculty members.
• Under the policy, authors publish their work in the journal(s) of their choice.
• The policy asks faculty members to provide an electronic copy of the postprint or author’s final accepted version (the version ​​that incorporates reviewers’ and editors’ suggestions from the peer review process, but that does not contain any of the formatting and typesetting that will be seen in the final published version of the article) as part of the annual faculty evaluation process through the Faculty Activity System (FAS) in the reporting year for the article, or otherwise indicate that the article has been deposited in the institutional repository.
• Faculty members may request a waiver or embargo for an article, no justification needed.  Furthermore, embargoes are decided by the author, not the publisher.  The open access policy explicitly grants authors the right to share their work at their discretion.
• If no waiver or embargo is applied, the work is made available in an open access repository; at OU, this is SHAREOK, the university’s institutional repository.

Copyright remains with the author.  The policy grants the University a nonexclusive license, which allows the University to make the author’s final accepted version of the article openly accessible.  

The nonexclusive license is critical to making the policy work. Often publishers ask that authors transfer copyright to them in order to publish an article. The nonexclusive license to the University ensures that even if you sign such an agreement, OU still holds the original nonexclusive license in trust. If you think of copyright as a key, by giving a copy to OU you ensure a copy is kept safe in case you lose or give away your own copy.

The open access policy has been reviewed by OU Legal Counsel.

No.  A major benefit of an open access policy is that it allows you to publish in journals of your choosing while giving you greater freedom to share your scholarship with readers who lack access to those journals and who would thus be unable to read your work.

The University will notify as many publishers as possible of the policy. Authors may also wish to attach a supplemental statement to their articles, either directly in the text or in notes to the editor or publisher at the submission or publication agreement phase:

“Notwithstanding conflicting agreements, this article is subject to the University of Oklahoma-Norman Open Access Policy.”

This is not required for the policy to take effect, but it is another tool for authors in cases where the policy and publication agreement do not align by default.
 

If you relied on fair use to repurpose the material without permission, then fair use also applies when sharing the article beyond the journal publication. If you received explicit permission to use the figure only as it would appear in the journal, you might need to remove it before sharing your article text.  It’s likely the permission was granted for the article in any format, not only for the specific publisher version. In general, if you’re asking for permission a good rule of thumb is to try to obtain rights to broadly disseminate the work. 

The policy applies to articles you write while at the University of Oklahoma, so you would be able to keep sharing those articles if you are no longer employed by OU.

Some content on this page is based on information from the University of Florida, the University of Maryland, the University of Arizona, and the University of Washington.